The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado Part 41

THE KINs.h.i.+P OF HUMANITY

But there flows from such a catastrophe a brighter and better influence than this. With all its horror and shock, there comes inevitably a great joining of minds and hearts. The whole world feels the thrill of kins.h.i.+p and a common humanity. For the time being all conceptions of social caste and cla.s.s distinction, the most unworthy thoughts of beings fas.h.i.+oned all in the image of their Maker, are leveled and forgotten.

Indifference and selfishness disappear. Throughout the nation, throughout the world, there thrills the uplifting current of brotherhood, the consciousness that "we be of one blood."

Wherever civilization has exercised its beneficent influence upon the minds of men there is felt, for a little time at least, the sense that all humanity is one; that the strife of man against man and nation against nation is but a pitiful thing, and that we may better concern ourselves with trying to make the common lot brighter and so soften the rigors of the existence we all must face.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF WEALTH

Specifically does not such an appalling event serve to awaken responsibility among the wealthy and powerful toward the poor and the weak? When all goes well, when there are no thunderous warnings such as this of the helplessness of man against the forces arrayed against him, the fortunate do not realize that for millions mere existence is a poignant struggle; that hunger and cold and disease prevail even when there are no ghastly floods to make them vivid and picturesque. We do not doubt that there are many who will be stirred by the shock of this dreadful story to a deeper and more sympathetic understanding with the conditions that surround them on every side.

INCENTIVE TO ENTERPRISE

If any further good can come from a catastrophe so cruel, it may be in the stimulating pride of race which it engenders. Such experiences have a unique effect upon the American nature. The greater the calamity which falls upon a community the greater seems to be the rebound. Destruction and hards.h.i.+p seem to open great reservoirs of latent energy, inventiveness and enterprise.

Galveston, suddenly overwhelmed by a convulsion of nature, apparently was doomed to molder away in forgotten ruins; but her people cleared the wreck and built a greater city than before. Before the ashes of the old San Francisco had cooled the vision of a better community rose before her inhabitants, and they made it real.

Calamity sets free such a flow of creative power that destruction itself makes for progress. These disasters concentrate upon constructive enterprise stories of emotional energy that in other times are expended in the fierce struggle of compet.i.tive existence.

THE GREATEST LESSON

But the great hidden teaching of disaster is that the laws of nature are eternal and inexorable; that they move with unerring precision and resistless force. And this truth applies not only to the tremendous powers of the hurricane, the flood and the earthquake, but to economic principles, which are simply a translation into human terms of the laws manifested in inanimate nature.

The woman whose health is wrecked by overwork, the child whose body and mind are stunted by early labor, the tenement dweller who falls victim to disease because of unwholesome conditions of living--these are sacrifices to natural laws as much as are the thousands swept away in the floods. But, while the flood deaths are due to an outburst of the elements which man cannot control, these others are the result of his defiance of the laws of nature.

There is another difference: The victims of economic wrongs due to cupidity and indifference outnumber a thousand to one the victims of natural causes beyond control. All the deaths in these fearful floods are less than those caused every year in a single large city by conditions that might be remedied.

Nature decrees that those who do not have certain amounts of fresh air and food and rest shall die; the law is inexorable. But it is civilization which defies it and brings down the penalty.

THE AWAKENING TO OTHER LAWS OF NATURE

A stranger thought is that many whose hearts are melted by this disaster and whose checkbooks open to the suffering survivors are habitually indifferent to the more deadly conditions existing on all sides of their homes. Men contribute generously to the relief funds who, if asked to surrender a fractional part of their dividends in order to make work safer and more healthful and more humane for employees, would berate the suggestion as anarchistic.

This is not due to hardness of heart; it is due to faults of vision. Men display such sympathy in one case and such ruthlessness in another simply because civilization has not yet advanced far enough to create generally the sense of responsibility which is called social consciousness.

There are those who believe that the good impulses aroused by such events as now appeal to us tend to awaken this consciousness; on the other hand, a $5,000 contribution to a flood relief fund may, by salving the conscience of the giver, close his mind to the need for changing industrial conditions or expending some of his tenement rents for decent sanitation.

Our own belief is that each calamity brings the minds of the nation into closer sympathy and hastens the day when all men will understand that the society they have builded is guilty of causing miseries just as great as those we are now witnessing, the defying the laws of nature because of indifference and greed.

THE NEED FOR ACTION

This country has suffered from many great floods in past years, but none so awful in its scope and terrible consequences. The present calamity must bring the country to its sober senses and make us see the positive necessity--the inevitable MUST--of taking immediate and adequate measures to guard against the repet.i.tion of such a disaster. "Strike while the iron is hot," has been the battle-cry of men of action throughout the world! And today, while the iron of adversity is hot in the bosom of the Republic, is the time to strike upon the ideas that are to make the heroic surgery of healing.

What is the remedy for these mighty floods that are sweeping and ruining the interior country? Beyond the supreme consideration of the loss of life they are the financial tragedies of the century. They occur at rare intervals in Ohio and Indiana and in New York. But in the valley of the Mississippi and in the Ohio Valley they are almost an annual or bi-annual scourge of waters, terrific in suffering and appalling in cost.

NOT A QUESTION OF COST

No expenditure of public money is too great that will strengthen the defenses of the people against the giant forces of destruction in the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. No cost in national expenditure for permanent defense against such catastrophes would approximate the cost in a single decade to the pockets of the people, not to speak of the uncountable value of human life. Governor c.o.x, of Ohio, estimated that the damage in Ohio alone by the recent floods was more than $300,000,000--nearly as much as the cost of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. The total cost of the recent flood is vastly greater than that of the Panama Ca.n.a.l!

The American Government can no longer stop to consider money in dealing with the problems of internal economy and of elemental humanity. The floods create an emergency as definite and imperative as war. It is time now to start some movement for the preservation of life and property against such occurrences.

MEASURES AGAINST REPEt.i.tION OF DISASTER

It is not the mission of this book to prescribe plans for meeting the situation. That must be the work of a corps of trained engineers who shall study the whole problem comprehensively and in detail. Rather it is our purpose here to bring home the overwhelming need for prompt action. We may be permitted, however, to point in a general way, and on high authority, the general lines that the necessary remedies must take.

The river problems in the great central valleys present certain difficulties which engineers have been unable to overcome. If levees are constructed, it is found that the bed of the stream rises also, so that the situation is not materially changed. If channels are deepened, the fury of the floods is increased. If the construction of reservoirs is proposed, there are very important questions of location and danger.

UTILIZING NATURAL RESERVOIRS

In many places the Mississippi River, closely diked, flows high above the lands adjacent. Even at New Orleans, 107 miles from the Gulf, it is during high water ten to fifteen feet above the level of the city.

Obviously the levee system, while useful everywhere and in some localities adequate, is not a universal remedy. Reservoirs properly constructed should be of service in storing the waters of many such rivers as those that have caused the havoc in Ohio and Indiana, but to meet the requirements they would have to be of enormous size, very numerous and costly, as Professor Willis S. Moore, chief of the Weather Bureau, points out.

Nature itself has provided in lowlands throughout all of these valleys receptacles which, before men came, took up the surplus waters. We have reclaimed millions of acres of these lands on the theory that we could confine the rivers which once overflowed them, but thus far we have failed to establish the theory.

It is probable that any successful national work for the control of rivers will have to start with the idea of utilizing some of these natural reservoirs. The lands would not be habitable of course, but for agriculture they would be enriched instead of, as now, devastated. To depopulate some such tracts would not be as costly or as terrible as to leave them to the sweep of irresistible torrents, repeated year after year.

PROMOTION OF FORESTRY

Despite Professor Moore's very positive denial of the value of reforestation as a preventive of floods, it is claimed by many authorities that much of the destruction is due to the fact that the states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois have been almost denuded of such forests as originally stood there. No impediment is offered to the flow of water and disastrous results follow. But in any event there would have been great floods because of the location of the rainstorms as noted.

CONSTRUCTION OF DAMS

The topography of the country must be taken into account. Both valleys, the Miami particularly, are veined with streams tributary to the rivers, and in times of flood the water rises with amazing rapidity and spreads far and wide over the valley floor. The level character of the region in which Dayton itself lies and the fact that there is not enough pitch to the land below to carry off the water accounts for the depth and extent of the floods. Dayton has had many of them. What Congress can do to prevent or minimize them in future by putting the army engineers at work to construct dams for the collection and restraint of waters in the valleys north of the threatened cities must be done, whatever the cost.

SECRETARY LANE'S PLAN

Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, has outlined a plan for preventing such floods as devastated Ohio and Indiana. The plan hinges on the deepening and widening of the channels of all streams that are liable to flood conditions. Mr. Lane hopes to see the idea carried out through the cooperation of the Federal Government, with the aid of the states immediately endangered.

Aside from the perpetual protection against flood, which he believes his plan would give to settlers in low regions, there are widespread districts along the Mississippi and many other rivers that would be thrown open to settlement. The land thus reclaimed from the swamps might go a long way, in Mr. Lane's opinion, to reimburse the states for the appropriations they would be called upon to make. Mr. Lane says:

"The rainstorm, I know, was phenomenal, and even with the system I have suggested would have doubtless resulted in material damage and the loss of some lives. But flood conditions reappear every spring in some noticeable way, and my plan would obviate most of the resulting damage.

"It will not do for Ohio or Indiana or even the two states together to spend their money generously in clearing the beds of the streams within their boundaries. That would merely carry the flood more swiftly to the state lines to the south, and the water would back more angrily than ever into what would quickly be great lakes. The thing is too large for the states alone. A harmonious, scientific system must be worked out by the federal authorities, and the states must then make their contributions in the way that will do the most good to the whole valley affected."

SENATOR NEWLAND'S PLAN

Senator Francis G. Newlands, of Nevada, who has made a long study of the whole subject of reclamation and conservation, and who speaks with authority on the subject says:

"The appalling disasters in Ohio and Indiana bring home more forcibly than ever the conviction that our present method of dredging, levees and bank revetment in limited districts is fundamentally inadequate. These things will not protect dwellers on the lower reaches of our rivers so long as there is no control of the headwaters.